Articles: palliative-care.
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Am J Hosp Palliat Care · Jun 2021
Providing Ethical and Humane Care to Hospitalized, Incarcerated Patients With COVID-19.
The COVID-19 pandemic is devastating the health of hundreds of thousands of people who live and work in U. S. jails and prisons. Due to dozens of large outbreaks in correctional facilities, tens of thousands of seriously ill incarcerated people are receiving medical care in the community hospital setting. ⋯ If ethical care is being obstructed, community health care professionals should contact the prison's warden and medical director to explain their concerns and ask questions. If necessary, community clinicians should involve a hospital's ethics committee, leadership, and legal counsel. Correctional medicine experts and legal advocates for incarcerated people can also help community clinicians safeguard the rights of incarcerated patients.
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Inadequate palliative care training in medical education is associated with many physicians feeling unprepared to care for dying patients and their families. Therefore, an opportunity exists to offer physicians continuing medical education that increases their understanding of and comfort with complex palliative care issues. The goal of the current study was to evaluate The Confessions of a Reluctant Caregiver Palliative Educational Program as an educational tool for physicians. ⋯ Moreover, they considered the program to be more useful than didactic lectures and journal articles. The results suggest that the Confessions of a Reluctant Caregiver Palliative Educational Program is a valuable education tool for palliative care training. More research is needed to explore its utility as an option for continuing medical education.
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Pain is the fearest and disabling symptom for cancer patients. The cornerstone of treatment is opioid analgesics. The objective of this research was to relate the opioid consumption existing in the Community of Madrid (CM) with the prescription habits expressed by the Primary Care (PrC) and Palliative Care (PalC) physicians. ⋯ There is a clear disagreement between the actual consumption of opioids and the prescribing habits manifested by family doctors, as well as a false certainty in prescribing these drugs.
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This study aimed to describe symptom prevalence of pain, shortness of breath, anxiety, and nausea and to identify factors associated with symptom relief in patients with heart failure during their last week of life. ⋯ The results show that key aspects of palliative care during the last week of life are significantly associated with symptom relief. Increased access to palliative care could provide a way to improve care during the last week of life for patients with heart failure. Home-based settings provided more symptom relief than hospitals, which may indicate that the latter focuses on treatments and saving lives rather than promoting life before death.
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Early conversations about patients' goals and values in advancing serious illness (serious illness conversations) can drive better healthcare. However, these conversations frequently happen during acute illness, often near death, without time to realize benefits of early communication. ⋯ Prospectively designed trial, non-randomized sample.